Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems are often employed to provide guidance to interventionalists who are performing interventional procedures that diagnose or treat tissue within a patient. In interventional procedures an interventional device may be guided by an interventionalist to a target tissue within a patient. Interventional devices may include, for example, needles, catheters, ablation devices, imaging devices, therapeutic devices, diagnostic devices, and so on. In an image guided interventional device insertion, the location of the device relative to the surrounding anatomy and target are determined using the MRI system.
To assist in MRI image guided interventional procedures, many techniques have been developed that track the location of an interventional (intracorporeal) device and update scan planes used by the MRI system so that the scan planes track the device. However, in some circumstances these techniques, which fix the scan plane relative to the interventional device, produce unsatisfactory results. For example, flexing of a catheter or needle on the device may cause misregistration of the scan plane and the tissue in treatment. In other instances, the interventionalist performing the procedure may wish to view an image that does not correspond to a scan plane in the fixed relationship to the interventional device being used on the patient. When a different scan plan is desired, a time consuming manual adjustment of the scan plane must be performed.